Blog | Bridge Riddell

In May of last year, my wife and I had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam to visit our friends Lance and Kristen who had been living in Đà Nẵng for about 2 years teaching English and working for Orphan Voice. It was an amazing experience and having friends who lived there allowed us to get immersed in Vietnamese food, culture and traffic very quickly. We spent most of our time in Đà Nẵng, but also explored Hội An, Huế, and surrounding areas. If you ever get a chance to go to Vietnam, be sure you motorbike over the Hải Vân Pass. It really is as awesome as Top Gear says in their Vietnam Special. It was an experience we will never forget, and we were lucky to share it with good friends.

This summer I had an itch to build something. I had been reading about headphone amplifiers and found the schematics for the popular Millet “Starving Student” Hybrid amp. I am new to electronics building, but this looked like a great project to learn with. I started my search for parts finding most of them at mouser.com but quickly realized that the 19J6 Tubes were going be be difficult to find. I contacted all the tube dealers I could find online and luckily found one that had three 19J6 tubes available. I bought all 3, which ended up being a good idea since I dropped one later on.

Once I received all the parts I built a prototype to the original MSSH amp specifications. It worked and sounded pretty good! I took what I learned from building the prototype and began planning out how I would build my final amp. I knew I wanted to make the enclosure out of wood, so I started to search for the kind of wood and finish that would compliment the warm glow of the tubes and work well with black hardware. I decided on bocote with a pure tung oil finish.

As I was building a new list of parts, I discovered that many users over at head-fi.org had been experimenting with and modifying the original schematic to enhance the sound as well as fix the power supply start up issue. I even found an updated schematic that uses the easily available 12AU7 tubes. I wished I had found the 12AU7 version at first, but since I already had the 19J6 tubes, I decided to continue to use them but with updated capacitors and resistors according to schematics and ideas posted throughout the head-fi.org starving student boards.

I really enjoyed building this amp and recommend it to anyone looking for a fun project or who just wants better sound through their headphones. It really does sound great, especially if you use the modified schematics. The bass is extended and the sound is warm and full. It’s much better than the headphone output from my computer or iPhone, and I love the look of the tubes glowing on my desk. Below are images of the final amp and some images of the building process. I plan to take what I learned from this project and build my own guitar effect pedals and a stereo power amp in the future.